Javascript templating double quotes

Question

I have an issue where I have a file which contains my objects in the form

Dog1: {
  information: {
    color: 'red',
    name: 'Tom'
  }
}

and I am building a program which automatically populates my object from a file but the current output has the form

"Dog1": {
  "information": {
    "color": "red",
    "name": "Tom"
  }
}

My issue is that i need single or double quotes around "red" and "Tom" but i don't need it on everything else. I have tried using jscodeshift but cannot seem to get it working. Anybody got any tips for this?

Thank you very much for your time, Joe

The latter one is standard JSON, the former one is a javascript expression. Javascript will parse the latter just as the same. Why do you need the former format? How do you generate the objects? — Tamas Hegedus, Jan 11 '16 at 09:53
i am working on a larger system and i just want to keep it the same for consistency , but also it is required to pass validation checks. While they are both valid my system requires the first one and I can't think of a way to do it which isn't a dirty hack. — joseph.allen, Jan 11 '16 at 10:01
So you have these objects in javascript, and tryingto serialize it to a string of the given format (and possibly sending that to a server)? How did you generate the second output? — Tamas Hegedus, Jan 11 '16 at 10:20
`newText = JSON.stringify(newParameter);` Then a file that is just a concat of newTexts which we use beautify on to format nicely `beautify(newDestFile, { indent_size: 2, unescape_strings: true, jslint_happy: true });` — joseph.allen, Jan 11 '16 at 10:56
sidenote: `JSON.stringify(newParameter, null, 4)` would do the formatting — Tamas Hegedus, Jan 11 '16 at 11:04

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

0

Your object is a JavaScript object right? However the object is written into the file, it seems that it´s written in JSON format (JavaScript Object Notation).

In my opinion, thats not wrong. It´s the correct way to store JavaScript objects. If you really don´t want the the quotes, you maybe need to implement your own logic for writing the object into the file.

Update: See JSON.Stringify without quotes on properties?. That guy had the same problem and the solution was to remove the quotes after calling JSON.stringify().

edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

Community

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answered Jan 11 '16 at 10:00

Franz Deschler

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i am working on a larger system which requires this kind of format, do you just recommend I write my own logic or regex to fix this? – joseph.allen Jan 11 '16 at 10:09
I don´t know what framework or libraries you use to write the object in the file. But if it saves the object as JSON, and you don´t want JSON, you maybe need to change some configurations, or implement your own logic. – Franz Deschler Jan 11 '16 at 10:13
just using stringify and beautify(for formatting) for now – joseph.allen Jan 11 '16 at 11:13
ok. Maybe this helps? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11233498/json-stringify-without-quotes-on-properties – Franz Deschler Jan 11 '16 at 11:34
that looks golden! I will give it a try and see what happens – joseph.allen Jan 11 '16 at 11:39

Tamas Hegedus · Answer 2 · 2016-01-11T12:24:54.067

I quickly implemented a custom json serializer for you:

function _serialize_object_key(key) {
  return /^[a-zA-Z_\$][a-zA-Z_\$0-9]*$/.test(key) ? key : JSON.stringify(key);
}
function _serialize_object(obj, opts, current_indent) {
  var arr = [], inner_indent = current_indent + opts.indent_inc;
  for (var key in obj) {
    if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
      arr.push(inner_indent + _serialize_object_key(key) + ': ' + _json_like_stringify(obj[key], opts, inner_indent));
    }
  }
  return '{\n' + arr.join(',\n') + '\n' + current_indent + '}';
}

function _serialize_array(arr, opts, current_indent) {
  var inner_indent = current_indent + opts.indent_inc;
  return '[\n' + inner_indent + arr.map(inner_map).join(',\n' + inner_indent) + '\n' + current_indent + ']';
  function inner_map(x) {
    return _json_like_stringify(x, opts, inner_indent);
  }
}

function _json_like_stringify(x, opts, current_indent) {
  switch (typeof x) {
    case "number":
    case "string":
    case "boolean":
    default:
      return JSON.stringify(x);
    case "object":
      if (x === null) return 'null';
      if (Array.isArray(x)) return _serialize_array(x, opts, current_indent);
      return _serialize_object(x, opts, current_indent);
  }
}

function json_like_stringify(x, indent) {
  if (indent === undefined) indent = 2;
  var indent_inc = '';
  for (var i = 0; i < indent; i++) indent_inc += ' ';
  return _json_like_stringify(x, {indent_inc:indent_inc}, '');
}

$('pre').text(json_like_stringify({a:[1,2,3],b:{c:{d:[6,7,"asdasda\"fgdfgdfg",true,null, [1, 2, 3, {' ':' '}, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]]}}}));

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<pre></pre>

Javascript templating double quotes

2 Answers2